They have but one standard: money;
one supreme value: power, the gift of wealth. Mime bewails his people
(the small tradesmen as it were), as follows; "Light-hearted smiths we
used to fashion gems and trinkets for our wives, gorgeous jewels, the
Niebelungs' pretty trifles--we laughed at the labour." But Alberich, the
capitalist, through the magic of the ring, has usurped the power and
enslaved his fellows. "Now the felon compels us to creep in the heart of
the mountains to labour for him. There we must delve and explore and
despoil, plunder and smelt and hammer the metal, restlessly toiling to
increase his treasure." The really daemonic property of the gold is that
everybody succumbs to its seduction and strives to possess it. The
former naive joy of living, embodied in the Rhine-daughters, and their
not yet humanised song, which seems to come direct from the heart of
nature, is destroyed by the theft of the Rhine-gold. What till then had
been a serenely shining "star of the deep," has been transformed into a
means by which to win authority.
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